The Australian government’s long and often troubled effort to introduce a personal electronic health record system has run into a patent snag, with Delaware-based MMRGlobal asserting both state and federal governments are infringing its patents.

Another software-defined networking startup has been scarfed up before it got rolling very far on its own. In this case, network-acceleration and load-balancing juggernaut F5 Networks has acquired LineRate Systems, whose founders have spent the better part of the last decade figuring out how to shape traffic way up in the stack to improve application performance.

If at first you don't succeed, and all that... Oracle now says the emergency Java Critical Patch Update it rushed out the door on February 1 didn't fix all of the issues it had originally intended to address, and that a revised patch including fixes for the remaining flaws will ship on February 19.

If you've got nothing better to do than faff around on Twitter, you're likely to be the sort who will enjoy having your Twitter account translated into Lolcatz, the language. Not your actual tweets, nor the tweets of anyone else, but just the various commands and buttons that furnish the page around the tweets.

A duo of Empire-hating rebels have realised the Kickstarter Death Star is a threat to the Rebel Alliance and they're looking for all like-minded galactic citizens to chip in for a fleet of $11m X-Wings.

Seagate aims to ship enhanced capacity shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk drives later this year and bring in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology next year, a full two years earlier than supposed. Possibly this is its riposte to the helium gas attack mounted by WD subsidiary HGST.

LinkedIn made money in 2012. By all accounts it has done better than it had the year before, and as a result its stock price has soared. Despite this, I have some serious questions about the service, even as my fellow technorati fall all over themselves to heap praise upon the company.

Two men have been jailed for 16 months for nicking large volumes of copper cable from BT's network. The pair posed as workmen to swipe the metal, cutting off telephone and internet connections to hundreds of homes and businesses.

How to gain solid-state performance with out losing hard drive capacity

The idea of using a low-capacity SSD to store the most frequently accessed files or parts of files in order to access them more quickly than a mechanical hard drive can serve them up - a technique called SSD caching - has been around for some time, but it wasn’t until the arrival of Intel’s Smart Response Technology with the company’s Z68 chipset, released in 2011, that the technology began to be implemented in personal machines rather than servers.

The National Audit Office (NAO) has published a report announcing that the UK doesn't have enough skilled workers to protect it against online attacks and asking Blighty's schoolkids to step into the breach.

Five years after he stepped down from day-to-day involvement in Microsoft, co-founder and chairman Bill Gates has revealed his frustration that Windows Vista's database-like file system never saw daylight.

Californian electric car maker Tesla Motors - well known for tangling repeatedly with the BBC (and the Register) over coverage of battery vehicles which it did not deem positive enough - is now in a row with the New York Times after one of the paper's journalists wrote a stinging review of its new Model S.

On Friday the internet was all a-flutter over a mysterious metallic-looking object that the Mars rover Curiosity snapped last month, but an analysis by NASA claims to have identified how it came to be.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a low opinion of a lawsuit filed by Greenlight Capital hedge-fund honcho David Einhorn that seeks to prevent Apple from amending its charter to allow the issuance of preferred stock without the approval of its shareholders.

Oracle says it plans to open source the Android and iOS implementations of its JavaFX UI platform "over the next couple months," which it says will allow Java developers to use the technology to write cross-platform smartphone apps for the first time.

If only we’d all known it would be so easy: in the wake of being summonsed by the Australian parliament’s inquiry into IT pricing, Adobe has cut the price of its Creative Cloud suite to Australian users.